Tonight is The West Wing reunion on HBO Max. It is not available here in Canada and, well, as West Wing nerds, Duana and I are pretty salty about it. That said, the return (for one night) of The West Wing has served up an interesting work and culture dilemma: can you still ship your favourite couple from a past favourite television show even though, through the lens of 2020, their relationship may have been problematic?
We’re talking about Donna Moss and Joshua Lyman. She was his assistant. So not only were there power dynamics in play but… F-cking Sorkin! Janel Moloney, who played Donna, was asked about this in a new interview with Vanity Fair published yesterday and her answer opens up a whole conversation about work loyalty, character loyalty, and whether or not we can revisit our work without betraying it.
Speaking of shows we get nerdy over – if you’re familiar with this podcast, you know how we feel about Saturday Night Live. It’s not that we think every episode of SNL is amazing but that’s not really the point of SNL anyway. This is live sketch comedy. This is the show that for over 45 years has been about showing the work in real time, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But the process itself will always be relevant.
This past weekend on SNL, Kate McKinnon “broke character”. But…did she really? Duana and I discuss that work that goes into “breaking character” and why the coverage about that moment oversimplifies what actually happened, and what’s underrated about how SNL happens week to week.
As for our work, we did it a little differently this episode because, well, I f-cked up. Which ended up being kinda fitting since we’re talking about Saturday Night Live and that’s sorta how we approached this week’s installment – we are basically freeballing, and we hope you enjoy it.
Thanks as always for listening!
